Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Ca. 1900, below, a 1794 engraving. Have designed across Atlanta for decades, of course I know where the best junk shops are, and go when clients are nearby.

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Tried not to buy this platter, barely $10, below. Yet its image seared the might of Providence & what we've lost across centuries.

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The scene, common until post WWII, and in thanks of Providence. Food & lifestyle & health & metaphor combined.

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Why WWII? Cheap gas, in USA, and the selling of lawn chemicals to housewives 'needing' to protect their children from harmful insects. Did you know housewives were a first target of international chemical companies?

Harvested last weekend, the dirt gracing these potatoes, below, made me want to find their field, take off my clothes and roll. A primal urge. I must be a potato'ist, or soil'ist, no man/woman has ever made me feel this way. Skip naming my team the Redskins, I'm a potato'ist and can name my team the redskins.
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Soil on these potatoes is alive & asks my hands to reach out and touch. I do. There is benediction. Never felt in church. Read, gout de terroir or, taste of the soil.

Views from the farm stand, below, there it was again. Perhaps a slight sprinkle of rain, everyone let's take off our clothes and go dance in the field. This vanishing threshold of bounty & nature is high church. Let's give thanks in dance. Prayers in singing.

Along the side of the road, below, where we first saw the cabbage truck. This is why Garden Design never bores. Providence humbles.

Had a wonderful day of Joan Rivers last weekend. She always said what everyone was thinking anyway.

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This is what I was thinking at the vegetable stand.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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I shot the pics last weekend.

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Baby, hope this explains why I kept telling you to get the okra but my brain/mouth were saying squash. Was lost in naked dance with the soil in the fields, thanking Providence.

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For a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, become my client,local/on-line.

Instead of a merely sweet, pretty, easy, garden design style, the potager was

a life support system throughout much of history. Terrible history, with subsistence living, wars, plagues, no anti-biotics.
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How did anyone, aka me, not know this about a potager? My grandmother knew these things. My mother falls within the scope of Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique. The generation of women leaving farms/agrarian knowledge behind to live a modern life raising children, tending house with a maid's help, and no work outside the home. Oh, the drudgery of it all and yes I'm one of those grown children crying throughout, The Help, every time I watch it.
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" Friedan says that this change in education arrested girls in their emotional development at a young age, because they never had to face the painful identity crisis and subsequent maturation that comes from dealing with many adult challenges.[9]".Sinful forgetting, a client named this loss of agrarian knowledge..Recently, because I now have chickens, mom has told stories about Grandma's chickens. Grandma was an RN & head nurse at her hospital in Augusta, GA. throughout those years she kept chickens and incubated many. Mom was an only child and said how she hated the time her mother spent with the chickens. From the stories I know Grandma raised significantly more chickens than her family needed or could feed easily with food scraps. Why? Grandma was giving away eggs and laying hens to every woman she met who needed a helping hand. .Garden & Be Well, XO Tara.Pic Bunny Williams.

For a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, become my client,local/on-line.

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Primal feelings. Before the sun sets, I will buy lettuce, & whatever else looks pretty, to plant in my potager.
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Getting dressed my brain was all about deciding where to find them.
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After today's appointment, Ashe-Simpson is on the way home. Hall's is a mile away.
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When the cold comes again, & it will, cloches.
.A primal planting-the-crop feeling or Marie Antoinette prancing to the potager with her favorite cloche's?

Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Pic, cloche in my garden. Have found most of my cloche at TJMaxx thru the years, Tuesday Morning and several at the late Smith&Hawkin.